Without God: Resentment and Utopia in Mainstream Fiction[0]

Paolo Braga

Robert McKee, a famous theorician on scriptwriting, following Aristotle
says that story, as well as philosophical argument, is a way of
answering the question "how a man should live his life"[1]. A story, in
fact, always carries within it an anthropological conception, telling
how and why a man, choosing certain behaviour, decides about himself.

Keeping this statement in mind, my aim is to highlight the core
elements of the idea of happiness suggested by a particular narrative
model called "The Hero's Journey". This model is both a standard
sequence of events and a stock of conventional dramatic roles widely
used by professional movie and TV scriptwriters. The importance of the
dramatic structure prescribed by "The Hero's Journey" is great because
the narrative schema it suggests is nowadays the most used in
Hollywood. It is a source of inspiration to which almost every
important scriptwriter is familiar: from The Lion King to The
Truman Show, from Rocky and E.T. to Face/Off,
its conception of the timing of plot and of the narrative functions of
characters is manifest behind the surface of numerous stories.

Firstly, I will show the cultural roots of the Hero's Journey. The
theorician of scriptwriting Chris Vogler considered this model as a
creative tool in order to make the categories of myth a source of
inspiration for writing fiction[2]. Currently, in many movies the
Hero's Journey is applied only in its more evident aspects: in these
cases -- for example, Gladiator or A Beautiful Mind --
the model is merely exploited to decide the order of the events in the
plot, when to make them happen, and to set the basic relationships
between characters. In my paper I will not consider these cases showing
a superficial use of the Hero's Journey. My intent is to focus on those
movies which not only adopt the model as a method of building appealing
narrative structures, but which are also fully faithful to its profound
meaning, accepting its philosophical premises. These premises, if well
analyzed, imply an ethic without God.

Secondly, I will stress how characters make their moral choices in
those movies in which the model described by Vogler receives a radical
acceptance, that is to say, I will focus on the moral criteria that
these productions offer the audience.

Finally, following both some of the ideas of Hans Jonas and the
sociological research of Colin Campbell, I will produce an
anthropological definition of contemporary narrative imagery.

1. The Hero's Journey: a seminal model of narration.

According to Vogler's categories, to engage viewers, at the beginning
of a film a character should be conceived as a person who lives a
stable but rather problematic life. His existence is satisfying only in
appearance, because his personality hides weaknesses -- sometimes in
terms of values, more often, when the model is strictly respected, both
in terms of the capacity of accepting reality and in terms of
psychological inhibitions. The real story of a main character, then,
begins when a messanger interrupts his daily routine and calls him to
the adventure. If the hero answers positively, he enters a new
dimension, assisted by an old and expert mentor: the hero leaves the
ordinary, apparently well-known world, to make a journey in a special,
unknown land. Here, after hard training, having overcome many trials,
and having defeated his antagonist in a supreme ordeal, the character
will attain full knowledge of himself. In this way, his personality
will be completed; the different sides of his psyche will be balanced;
the person will become strong enough to deal with the fatal flaw.

The more important result of the character's efforts is therefore a
fresh, new glance at life. It is the attitude of feeling in harmony
with the world and with people, now seen in a perspective -- perhaps
eccentric but profound -- rooted in the experience of truth: the truth
he has gained through his extrordinary journey. In other words, it is
possible to say that the hero returns in his ordinary world empowered
with "an elisir".

This frame is easily recognizable in many worldwide successful
productions. The frame corresponds, for example, to the plot of Star
Wars[3]: Luke Skywalker is called to adventure by two smart robots;
then he is trained by Obi-Wan Kenobi and by Joda and learns how to use
the clear side of the Force that is inside himself. Luke understands
therefore how to dominate his anger while still being a fighter, how to
move objects with his thought. Thus, in the end, he will conquer Darth
Vader, master of the dark side of the Force.

Another good example is Dead Poets' Society[4]: Prof. Keating
arrives in a severely ruled high school where he teaches his students
the real essence of life. The teenagers in his class learn that
passionate creativity means freedom; they learn that inspiration means
liberation and that, by losing it, life becomes full of lies. Although
not everyone is able to maintain this attitude (there is a shocking
suicide of a student oppressed by a paranoid father), truth will have
been revealed.

A similar frame, again, constitutes the plot of a more recent success:
The Sixth Sense[5]. In this movie, the ghost of a psychiatrist
learns to accept his condition as a dead man, by teaching a phobic
child with paranormal capacities to communicate with the lonely spirits
of murdered people and with his mother too.

Finally, similarly, the same story is told in The Matrix[6]:
Neo, a hacker, finds out that his ordinary world is an illusion, that
his usual life is an electronic simulation generated by a tyrannic
system of machines to dominate mankind. With the help of Morpheus and
of a group of rebels who believe that he is predestined to save
everyone, Neo will learn both what the real world is like and how to
manage with the global illusion he is in.

2. The philosophical conception behind the model.

A short philological inquiry proves how the idea of ethics guiding
stories of this kind excludes God. The inquiry makes clear that this
occurs not just because God isn't mentioned -- in fact He is sometimes
present in a movie through symbols: the Cross, a Church, a statue of
Christ. Fiction of this genre, on the contrary, subtly suggests the
idea that the natural order, as a premise which, intelligible by
reason, should lead to the notion of a personal God who created
everything because of his love, is not the right premise if one wants
to find the truth.

Chris Vogler's The Hero's Journey is in fact a synthesis, aimed
at mainstream showbusinessmen, of a longer essay by Joseph Campbell:
The Hero with a Thousand Faces[7]. Treading in the wake of
Jung's analytical psychology, Campbell thinks that myth, to which he
reduces also revealed religion, is a privileged way of arriving at
truth about the meaning of existence. In Campbell's point of view,
myth, and not philosophical thought in the western, classical meaning,
tells in a symbolical manner what man is and what he ought to be.

In Campbell's opinion, myths of all cultures, if subjected to a
comparative approach, depict the same anthropological idea and the same
model of existence as the one ordered for happiness. The truth coming
from myths consists in the persuasion that the ideal course of
existence is in its essence an initiation passage which develops
through three steps: separation from the world -- initiation -- return.
For Campbell, these stages cover the distance between ignorance and
knowledge, in explicit conformity with the gnostic philosophy, which he
conceives as the western version of Buddhism and, in general, whole
oriental thought[8].

This position basically means three points: a gnoseological one and an
anthropological one, both depending on a third one, a metaphysical
vision. In a gnoseological perspective, mythology tells us a secret:
the object of our senses, and of our emotions, is just an illusion, a
kaleidoscopic pattern of forms that veils true reality[9].

Secondly, in an anthropological perspective, man's reason is unable to
grasp the truth: reason is inevitably drawn away by its attitude to the
accentuation of opposites, while the subject is suspended between the
misleading impulses of desire, fear and duty[10].

In the third place, in a metaphysical perspective and on a more
fundamental level, true reality is an ocean of energy from which
everything comes and into which everything dissolves; fragments of
this power, sparks of it, constitute the core of each person who,
enlightened by an esoteric knowledge, become aware of their belonging
to the whole, like a drop of water belongs to the sea.

It's remarkable how Campbell correctly deduces from this premise the
function of virtue, using words which are worth citing directly:

. . . mythology does not hold as its greatest hero the merely virtuous man.
Virtuous is but the pedagogical prelude to the culminating insight, which
goes beyond all pairs of opposites. Virtue quells the self-centered ego and
makes the transpersonal centeredness possible; but when that has been
achieved, what then of the pain or pleasure, vice or virtue, either of our
own ego or of any other? Through all, the transcendent force is then
perceived which lives in all, in all is wonderful, and is worhy, in all, of
our profound obeisance[11].

3. The influence of Joseph Campbell on some representations of
happiness in contemporary cinema.

It is interesting to consider more in detail how the gnostic view of
Campbell influences mainstream narrative immagery. That is to say, it
is interesting to see how it influences the Aristotelian idea of
narration, entirely based on the notion of virtue, of natural law and
of likelihood -- an idea strongly present in American productions
introduced by directors such as Frank Capra and John Ford. Indeed,
Campbell's view does exert an influence. It is honestly declared, among
many others, by Peter Weir[12] himself, George Lucas, and John
Milius[13]. Night M. Shyamalan, for example, gave a significant answer
when asked about the motif of faith, a motif that is developed through
his movies:

. . . it's basically this faith, believing in fate. Believing that ... [as]
Joseph Campbell [said], "Take the adventure that's being offered to you."
. . . There will be guides to help you along the way, and if you refuse it,
you will experience a negative adventure in the same way through your
life.[14]

My point is that a shift is perceivable in some contemporary cinema in
the depiction of the telos of characters: it is a different idea from
the narrative ending of a movie. The hope for a liberation from the
constraints of everyday life tends to substitute the intimate
assimilation of values granted by virtuous attitudes.

In Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life[15] George Bailey regains
his hope, hope in the help of the community for his commitment in the
concreteness of family in his social environment. Instead, in Dead
Poets' Society, viewers are invited to an euphoric assertion of the
Id, which is no longer a personal Id, but is the Ego of the group who
has attained knowledge and whose members can share the same powerful
current of energy. That is why during an intense sequence, while
kicking a ball in a football field where Prof. Keating is healing the
spirit of his students, one of them cries "I'm like God!".

In the same way, the ending of The Sixth Sense shows that the
once phobic child is "now ready to communicate", that is to say, ready
to feel compassion or, more precisely, to feel strong empathy with
others, ready to feel the vibration of life. Similarly, in The
Matrix, Neo, after his enlightenment, is able to enter the time of
everything, even to enter "the bullet time".

If what has been described so far is correct, it is then possible to
point out some of the elements of the ethical vision that is behind
characters like those examined.

It is an ethic based on an illusory self-knowledge that is restricted
to an instantaneous revelation. In fact, either the character finds the
way of the gnosis and (as Campbell himself observes) can then live in
an eternal ectasy because of the "eternal elisir", or,
like the students of Weir, like Neo before meeting the rebels, like the
child in The Sixth Sense, he feels predetermined by his past.
The past is a veil which has deceived any possibility of attaining the
meaning of life.

In effect, even when the secret knowledge is gained, it is often a
matter of predestination. The importance of predestination bypasses
that of a moral choice which is rooted in the rational evaluation of
things: this is, for example, the meaning of Signs[16], the last
movie by Shyamalan, in which the main character in the end understands
that the last words of his dying wife had been a premonition of the way
he would have saved his son from the aliens.

It is therefore possible to say that the subject either is happy
because his praxis no longer meets restrictions, or he resents destiny,
because it hasn't chosen him. And because destiny is an impersonal
entity, resentment easily shifts against the subject himself. In
Dead Poets' Society, in fact, the student who commits suicide
because of the prohibition to become an actor resents both his father's
strict mentality and his own existence.

In the second place, the ethic at stake seems to be quite blind towards
family life. It is much more sensible to the sentimental affair between
a man and a woman as an event in which one experiments for the first
time the energy of the whole. Experiencing romantic love, man is
rescued through an enthusiastic reaction from the acceptation of the
world as it is in its appearances.

In Campbell's point of view, love is the encounter with the
Goddess[17], which is the origin of the cosmic force. By the light of
the affinity of this theory with Jungian categories, love means first
of all a shock that creates a new balance in personality, originating a
harmony between its gender identity, often problematic in the
beginning, and the whole. For example, in Dead Poets' Society,
again, the experience of first love is placed in the broader context of
the enlightenment of the students. Love is a self-referred event; it's
mainly the origin of a new self-knowledge; it has a therapeutic effect.

This is also the case, for example, of the main character in the movie
Good Will Hunting[18], in which love and psychological therapy
are explicitly linked. But the conception of gender identity as the
result of an initiation process which cures an originally imbalanced
personality is widely represented. The most famous example may be
Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs[19], in which Hannibal
Lecter, in spite of being a serial-killer, is a mentor, a psychiatrist
guiding agent Clarece Starling, forced, in a male role, to discover her
female sensibility[20].

The same discovery takes place in Titanic[21] by the main
character troughout her relation with the artist intepreted by Di
Caprio, who, having accomplished his mission, will die in the end.

My point, therefore, is that moral judgment and moral conscience are
weakened by a frame in which ethical reasoning tends to be substituted
by an extraordinary experience, so concentrated that it seems
insufficient to embrace the course of an entire life and its daily
commitment. The person fluctuates between utopia and resentment,
because the subject of its telos is thought only in psychological
terms. Significantly, in the second part of his book, Campbell
approaches gnostic cosmology passing "From Psychology to
Metaphysics."[22]

4. Adolescence and work in some TV long running series.

On the basis of these considerations, I'll try to test the correctness
of my argument paying attention to a different kind of fiction: long
running TV series. I feel that this widening of perspective will
support my thesis: I believe that the elements I have pointed out
starting from the "Hero's journey" are indicative of a significant
trend in our culture.

It seems to me that those elements depict an influence that converges
with other cultural and ethical models in building a globalized
mentality which refuses to think of happiness in relation to God, and
hence can't find happiness[23].

I will concentrate on the representation of adolescence and on that of
professional work. I have chosen two series, Dawson's Creek and
E.R.. Both are global successes, and both great examples of
productions, the former representing teenagers, and the latter young
professionals.

Dawson's Creek[24] tells the story of a small group of students
during their high school years. Each one has serious problems either
with family or in accepting the new kind of responsibilities and
affective relationships connected with growth. To understand the
ethical model proposed by this fiction, it is necessary to know the
dramatic concept of the series from the words of its creator, Kevin
Williamson:

My teenagers are self-aware and smart and they talk like they have 10 years
of therapy and they have all the answers. But their behavior completely
contradicts that. Their behavior is that of a 15-year-old, inexperienced
and not sure of the next step[25].

This is the anthropological premise of Dawson: a premise which
creates never ending problems to its characters, translating them into
numerous events which have to be told thus lenghtening the series,
providing innumerable exciting episodes for the audience.

The existential dynamism of such characters seems to be ruled by the
fluctuation between utopia and resentment presented above. In this
series, in fact, dialogues always activate the same pattern: the
sequence of lines pronounced by two characters during a conversation
invariably re-propose a climax from resentment to utopia. Obviously,
the matter at stake is how difficult, how painful it is to become an
adult: sentimental frustrations, obsession with sex, anguish about the
future at college. One of the two characters who at the moment is
suffering, resentful towards adults because of their utiliarian style
of life, asks for his friend's advice. The friend, then, tries to
relieve the pain of his companion resorting to a weak form of wisdom,
what remains from a traditional morality if its anthropological reason
is completely forgotten.

Two crucial elements are clear at this point. The first element is that
the aim of the young therapist is identical to his patient's: how to
preserve and to cultivate the emotional, though painful inspiration,
which is an essential part of the adolescence experience. Secondly, the
patient, in his pain, actually knows very well that the help he is
receiving is not grounded in any different truth from the one he
already possesses.

That's why the role of the wise friend very soon becomes that of an
incompetent one. His words have the mere effect of giving the other
character new confidence in himself, not a solution. The teenager who
in the beginning of the dialogue was suffering, by the end of it has
understood that what counts is exactly the strong emotion he wanted to
end. Not only that, but he is also now so enlightened and so tuned in
with the secret feelings of the apparently wise friend that he can tell
him the truth: these strong emotions are the only possible condition
for communicating with each other. There is no communication without
empathy, without an intense fusion of the same emotion. Of course, this
utopian conclusion sets the premise for a new climax that will start as
soon as a new aspect of the emotional energy will strike a character.

Like growth, professional work is another crucial condition to attain
happiness. In this case, as well, if the idea of a amorous creation is
cancelled, work cannot be thought of as a way of receiving the world as
a gift. The representation given of it by mainstream fiction seems to
prove that there is no other choice than that between utopia and
resentment. The seminal series E.R.[26] has shown emblematically
the constant shifting between these extremes.

At the first-aid ward of the policlinical hospital in Chicago, a staff
of workaholic physicians cope night and day with the medical
emergencies of the city: crowds of patients in panic swarm into the
hospital, making it impossible for the main characters to live private
lives. Their only clear moral value seems to be resistence, like a
soldier in war. In E.R. the enemy is death, the illness of
patients which means absence of meaning. That's why the existence of
characters, like their job, rapidly shifts from sequences of stasis,
waiting for the next attack, to moments of explosive tension, during
emergencies. While not declaring it, characters feed the illusion of
the end of strain, the illusory chance of ending their work
forever.[27]

In E.R. duty is the main cause of resentment. It's felt as an
impossible mission, without knowing who the mandator is. The normative
constraints of work tend to overshadow the constructive side of it. The
fear of having made a mistake, for example during an operation, is so
strong, that the praxis of characters is always oppressed by the sting
of their conscience. The hospital is like an arena in which guilt is
ever present.

In routine periods dialogues reveal conflicting and inquisitive
attitudes. Each one, ready to a defensive reaction, approach colleagues
teasing their weakest point, in the secret awareness that there is a
"ghost in everyone's closet".

Living every day on the edge of nonsense, they have seen its many
faces. In E.R. the protagonists, as in the noir genre, are
hard-boiled characters. They have definitely lost their hope for
enlightenment: they are almost persuaded that any decision they take
will be a moral compromise, a surrender to the absence of a moral
truth.

So, while they are thrown in an unintelligible universe, their refuge,
again, is utopia. This latter now cosists of the arousal which is
caused by the climaxes of professional effort. Only when the physicians
are "losing" a patient, only when the deadline is impending over them,
do they know what to do and, above all, they feel bonded: again,
characters can communicate only when their emotions explode.

To conclude my paper, I will refer to the thought of a philosopher who
has studied gnosis in great depth, Hans Jonas. I will underline its
congruence with the analysis of consumeristic mentality developed by a
sociologist, Colin Campbell.

In his classical article Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism[28],
Jonas establishes a parallelism between gnosticism and existentialism.
In his opinion, both positions are conviced of the abyss of alienation
that is between man and the world, a world to which God, whether or not
conceived in immanentistic terms, is indifferent.

For Gnosticism, Jonas says, "the world is the product, and even
essentially the embodiment, of the negation of knowledge. What it
reveals is an unenlightened and therefore malignant force."[29] It's
refusal of law, the "antinomism" of gnosticism, is
not so different from "the subversion of the idea of law in Heidegger's
interpretation of Nietszche"[30]. The existentialistic freedom from a
silent God, its idea of a "trans-essential freely "projecting"
existence"[31] which can't find any clue in nature correspond to the
negative gnoseologic statements of Gnosis.

Most of all, Gnosticism and Existentialism share the same belittlement
of the present as a temporal dimension in which praxis could find its
realization. Jonas cites the assertion of the Valentinian gnostic
school: "What makes us free is the knowledge of who we were, what we
have become; where we were, wherein we have been thrown; whereto we
speed, where from we are redeemed; what is birth and what is
rebirth"[32]. In this context, present is reduced to "the moment of
gnosis itself, the peripety from the one to the other in a
supreme crisis of the escatological now"[33].

Now, analyzing the categories of existence posed by Heidegger, Jonas
notes that also in this case the present is annihilated. Existentialism
reduces the present to the moment of the decision which originates from
the reaction between the projected future and the given past: "moment,
not duration, is the temporal mode of this present -- a creature
of the other two horizons of time, a function of their ceaseless
dynamics, and no independent dimension to dwell on."[34].

In both cases, therefore, "No present remains for genuine existence to
repose in."[35] I'm suggesting in this discussion that the past is the
one of resentment against destiny, the future is the one of the utopia
of a perennial enlightenment in this present life.

All these elements can be seen in the light of what Colin Campbell says
in his The Romantic Ethic and The Spirit of Modern Consumerism[36].

The thesis of this author maintains Weber's statement of the importance
of the Protestant ethic as a precondition for capitalism. Campbell,
however, goes further: he underlines a hidden side of the Protestant
abnegation and ascetism: an emotivistic drive toward introspection and
autostimulation of emotion (do my feelings prove that I have been
justified?). This drive, as a stimulus for the demand of goods, was a
fertile ground for consumeristic imagination. The cultural mediation
operated by the Romantic Movement magnified the drive and, under the
influence both of novel and of advertising (two contemporary
inventions), it shifted the emotivism in direction of a dreamed,
idealized reality.

To Campbell, this scenario is still alive, and mass media have enhanced
it. He notes that nowadays, in middle class families, the young adult
abandons his adolescence, which is romantic and bohemian, to enter into
an adulthood which is ruled by rationalistic-utilitarian principles. He
will preserve in any case his inflated imagination as an escaping
system, as a secret utopian shell defending his dream of happiness.

It seems to me that technocracy and romanticism play the same role as
the one played by ascetism and by libertarianism in Gnosticism. Jonas,
in fact, observes that these last two moral figures are consequential
to the gnostic depreciation of natural law. Ascetism as a disdainful
condemnation of ordinary life norms and libertarianism as a proud
reaction to its fallacy are two faces of the same coin[37].

Now, considering the plots of some mainstream fiction, and considering
what Colin Campbell says, the conclusion of the present discussion is
that instead of ascetism we find rigorism, and that instead of
libertinism (but it is not totally absent, as advertising communication
shows) there is emotional excitement. Rigorism finds its origin in an
exasperated addiction to work in order to compensate a frustrated need
for meaning. Emotional excitment, instead, is the expression of the
divertissment from the absence of meaning, both in the form of the
adrenalinic arousal and in that of romantic sentimentalism.

The circle is closed. The longings for a liberation typical of
gnosticism, which depends on the incapacity of dealing both with duty
and with pleasure, meets the melancholy of existentialism, which is in
turn added to the melancholy typical of romanticism. The sentimental
idealization of romance strengthens the longing for a gnostic
abandonment of the self. In the meantime, resentment, generated by the
frustration caused by the difference between imagined reality and that
ordinarily lived, is another good reason for escape. Nostalgia for
romance, and at times for childhood, meets utilitarian pressure in
excluding family and in promoting a long adolescence.

There is no more ground for practical syllogism. Its premises are not
intelligible values, but a continuum of emotional moods, extremely
polarized between the opposites of feeling of inadequacy and of cosmic
vibration, between absolute loneliness and absolute identification.
Happiness is not rooted in values, but in a semantic field on which the
character, the person, endlessly looks for a positioning, but never
finds Someone to love and to be loved in return.

[0] I'm much obliged to Dr. Fulvio Di Blasi for his precious editorial
advice and to Professor Armando Fumagalli for his willingness to
discuss the topics of this paper.

[7] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1949). I will refer to the edition by The World
Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York, 1967.

[8] This point is particularly clear in Diane K. Osbon (ed.), A
Joseph Campbell Companion. Reflections on the Art of Living
(Harper-Collins, 1991). I'll refer to the Italian translation of this
collection of lessons (Guanda, Parma 1998). Osbon proposes the
contributions presented by Campbell in 1984 at the Elasen Institute in
Big Sur, California. The participation of Campbell to a seminar at this
Institute is itself meaningful of how his thought is well tuned with
the New Age movement. On how New Age has been a powerful source of
inspiration for the American cinema during the last thirty years, see
Claudio Siniscalchi, Il dio della California. La New Age
cinematografica (Roma: Ente dello Spettacolo, in collaborazione con
Pontificia Università S.Tommaso d'Acquino -- Angelicum, Istituto
Superiore di Scienze Religiose "Mater Ecclesiae", 1998).

[9] See how Campbell in the prologue of The Hero explains his vision
referring both to the psychoanalytical conception of dreams and to the
dionysiac origin of tragedy.

[10] On this particular point, about the influence exerted on Campbell
by the Buddhist conception of pleasure, of fear and of duty as
temptations, see A Joseph Campbell Companion, 180 (Italian
translation).

[11] The Hero, 257.

[12] Peter Weir has directed, besides Dead Poets' Society, great
successes such as Witness and The Truman Show.

[13] John Milius wrote, among many others, a movie that has made the
history of cinema, Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Ford
Coppola. He also wrote and directed Conan the Barbarian.

[20] For an analysis of this movie that shows how it is entirely based
on the psychology of Jung, see John Izod, Myth, Mind and the Screen.
Understanding the heroes of our time (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001) 105-123.

[21] Titanic, directed by James Cameron (Usa, 1997).

[22] The Hero, 255.

[23] Of course I am considering American productions because they are the
most viewed in the world, and I'm concentrating just on a segment of them
whose principles seem homogeneous. I'm not forgetting that many movies
produced in the U.S. show a different and positive anthropologic view: for
example, some of the movies directed by Spielberg, and those directed by
Mel Gibson.

[26] E.R. Emergency Room, created by Michael Crichton and John
Wells (Usa, 1994).

[27] Incidentally, it's worth noting that on this subject in Joseph
Campbell point of view work should be felt as a game; we could speak of
work only when we don't like what we are doing. See Osbon, A Joseph
Campbell Companion, 165 (Italian traslation).

[28] Hans Jonas "Gnosticism and Modern Nihilism" in Social
Research 19 (1952), 430-452; subsequently revised and published
with the title "Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism" in Hans
Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Beacon, Boston 1958, 19632),
320-340. We'll refer to the essay in his first version as it has been
republished in Robert. A. Segal (ed.), The Allure of Gnosticism
(Open Court Publishing Company, Peru (Ill.) 1995) 117-135.